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In this companion post to our Biznar mobile search app road test we catch up with Abe Lederman, CEO of Deep Web Technologies to explore his mobile roadmap and aim to open up more to third-parties and app developers.

Let’s start with a high-level view of Deep Web Technologies…

Deep Web Technologies started in 2002. We’re about 20 people, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we started out by building public federated search applications for federal government clients. Our best known application is probably Science.gov. It’s a public site and searches about 50 different R&D data bases from across the U.S. federal government. We followed on with worldwidescience.org that searches about 80+ databases from all over the world, including databases that are not in English. We have a very unique patent-pending technology that does multi-lingual searching, so we can take a query, translate it from the user’s language to the languages of the databases being searched, which include German, French, Russian, Chinese — about 10 languages total.

And then from there, we expanded into working with commercial customers. One of our customers is BASF [major German chemical company]. We’ve also expanded into providing federated search to academic libraries. Numerically, they’re the largest number of our customers, and the marquee customer on that list is Stanford University.

The model for the company is mostly subscription based. Our customers, our partners pay us a subscription to develop, run and maintain applications. Stanford University, for example, pays us an annual fee to run the application for them. In the future, ad-based revenue can be a viable part of what we do. The mobile apps — Biznar and Mednar — are free.

So far, Biznar and Mednar are about us ‘dipping our toes into the water’ in mobile applications. Mobile isn’t a source of revenue, and the apps are free, so we have released our mobile apps without much promotion to watch the user response first. Having said that I think what we offer works well on an iPhone for people who are heading to a business meeting and need one last fact or piece of information to prepare for that meeting. Now, we get asked all of the time: “How is Biznar — or any of our apps — different from Google?” The difference is that we search quality information sources. Google has great stuff in its results, but it also has a lot of sources that are not so reputable or so useful. You don’t have that problem with Biznar.